Template:M intro design symbol processing: Difference between revisions

SBF’s insightful musings on the bard call to mind the difference between the [[data modernists]] and the rest of us: the nature of discourse as a bilateral, interactive thing, as compared to symbol processing: where a machine consumes a bunch of symbols and executes a series of preset commands, without ''learning'' anything and without ''changing'' the nature of the text.

[[Symbol processing|The thing]] about “Shakespeare” — the body of work, not the dude —is it that isn’t just “code” deposited in a  kind of Elizabethethan GitHub database and left there inviolate, for future generations to download and run. That  may be its root, but “Shakespeare” as we know it is the body of work that has grown around it: the performances, the learned monographs, the university lectures and countless sophomore essays, the re-readings, the editions, the adaptations and reimaginings, the ''mis''interpretations — if there even can be such a thing — the peculiar ability of oh Shakespearean adages and idioms to leach into the vernacular. Beyond that root — to be sure, an extraordinarily stout and fertile root it is — none of the Shakespearean canon comes from William Shakespeare.

This is the nature of human language: meaning does not subsist in the code, but comes through the mystical collision between text and the reader’s cultural warehouse of experience and expectation. Meaning doesn’t exist on the page, but is made, there on the fly, in the act of interacting. A similar process went on when William Shakespeare created his texts, but it only happens once, and his cultural milieu is entirely lost on us now. William Shakespeare’s genius was to generate text so enduringly susceptible to creative interpretation by successive generations. His luck was that his texts caught the public attention in the first place

It may be — almost certainly is — true that other artists created work is rich in potential interpretation, but were never discovered and disappeared into dust. That [[Nietzsche]] and [[Blake]] almost suffered this fate, before being posthumously recognised, illustrates the point.  

So in one, trivial, sense [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] is right. Shakespeare’s ''code'' may not be an outlier in the history of written literature, known and unknown. (The idea that there is a “best” playwright in history— that literature can be ranked, is utilitarian drivel at it's stupidest. [[There is no machine for judging poetry]]). But boy, does that trivial observation miss the point. For however threadbare the code, the richness of the Shakespearean ''canon'' is like nothing else known on earth.

The Shakespeare canon is the great illustration of art as a dynamic, living, organic thing. William Shakespeare, late of Stratford-upon-Avon is an important part of what we now know (...and love?) as Shakespeare, but the strange loops thrown around that body of work ever since, strengthening it, binding it, reinterpreting it, appreciating it — casting light on potential readings, weeding out or ignoring lesser known or obscurer extracts — this is what makes Shakespeare so enduring. Shakespeare endures because ''Shakespeare is not dead''.

The same thing is happening when we communicate. When the JC commits symbols to page, like this one, for better or worse he brings his own “cultural apparatus” to the task: an idiosyncratic grasp of the English language, a particular cultural upbringing, and formal and informal education from the schools of the academy and hard knocks. Should anyone (else) ever read this, they will bring ''their'' unique cultural apparatus — no less idiosyncratic — to the task of making sense of this odd string of symbols.  

This “making sense of it” is just as creative an act as the original string assembly. Arguably, more so: at least I had ''some'' idea what I was trying to say, however confused I may have been about saying it. For another reader to make sense of this windbaggery at all, she must first share ''some'' of the JC’s cultural apparatus — to a non-English speaker it would would mean nothing at all — but she certainly won’t share ''all of it''. Almost certainly there will “basis” between transmitted and received meaning.  

So Steven Pinker’s proposition, that there is a perfect, hi-fidelity transmission of ideas between our heads — that “we can shape events in other’s brains with exquisite precision” — is wishful rationalism. But it misses what is so special about human communication. We do not read each other inertly, as if scanning barcodes: the language interaction creates a dynamic new thing between us that we can play with, refine and adjust for the future. Language does not chain us to the past: 8t opens a door to the future. Language is design space. It is how we keep the game going.